


it's simple

by triggeringthehealing (froggydarren)



Series: FullmoonFiclet Entries [89]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Off Screen One Night Stands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 21:01:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12465876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/froggydarren/pseuds/triggeringthehealing
Summary: No strings attached. No complications. It was just them and it was supposed to be simple.





	it's simple

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Full Moon Ficlet](https://fullmoon-ficlet.livejournal.com/521324.html) challenge on Livejournal, prompt #246: feelings

It’s supposed to be simple. No complications, no attachment, no hangups, nothing that anyone can be hurt by. 

It took a while. But eventually the carefully crafted agreement went to absolute shit, because it always does. Because they’ve been lying to themselves, even if they weren’t lying to each other. 

“I want you,” is what started it all, mumbled in the middle of the night, after a few too many drinks. 

It was Stiles who was drunk, obviously, but not too drunk to not remember the mumbled semi-confession in the morning. 

“I meant it,” he said into the silence of the dawn, this time louder and clearer. “I know you wouldn’t take advantage of my ramblings, but I did mean it.”

It took some time before Derek took him up on the offer to… well, to relieve their frustration and to have simple, no promises, no complications sex. Stiles didn’t push, and he didn’t wait around for Derek to change his mind. He had one night stands occasionally, while they were on the road — they were quite well known in the supernatural community now, “problem solvers”, the duo that battled anything that threatened a pack or a town — and he knew that Derek wasn’t celibate either. 

They ended up sleeping together several times before either of them made a move in a sexual way. It wasn’t fully deliberate the first time Derek put his hands on Stiles, but it wasn’t entirely accidental either. Stiles was in the middle of a bit of a dry spell, about two years into their travels around the country, and he woke up — not for the first time, but for the first time with Derek right in front of him — hard as rock, yearning for a release. 

When he tried to move away, Derek reached back and pulled him in instead, arching his back just the right way. Stiles waited until Derek was fully awake, and when that didn’t result in panic or moving away, he put his hands on Derek’s stomach and pulled him in. 

It was simple then, to whisper a full confession of how he found Derek attractive — it wasn’t news to either of them — while he rubbed his cock against Derek’s ass, thin layers of fabric between them, until he came in his underwear, the damp patch extending onto Derek’s sweatpants. Then it was as easy as breathing, Derek turning around, their lips meeting in a soft kiss, Stiles’s hand reaching into Derek’s pants and stroking him until he came too. 

They still hooked up with others sometimes, when the opportunity presented itself. But more often than not, they fell into bed together, handjobs turned into blowjobs turned into fucking each other in ways that Stiles couldn’t pretend he hadn’t imagined in the past. 

He’s wondering when things changed, sometimes. There’s no specific moment that he can pinpoint, no big turning point of when he stopped seeing Derek as just a partner on their mission to help out the supernatural community, just a convenient warm body. If he’s honest with himself — which Stiles rarely is, really — Derek was always more than that. They’re friends now, have been for a long time, the friendship cemented that time when Stiles talked his way into the FBI operation that targeted Derek. 

He can’t remember when he started turning down offers in bars and clubs they’ve gone to on their travels, can’t think of the one that was the last. But he doesn’t, now, he feels no draw to go to bed with others, no matter how attractive he finds them. 

Something is different, but what they have works. He’s refusing to sour things between them, to change the dynamic that they’ve built, to rock the boat that’s occasionally teetering on the verge of flipping over anyway. 

He cares. He always did, really, but these days something clenches his stomach when he’s  _ almost _ too late to come to Derek’s rescue, when the cuts and wounds look a little too deep. When he feels a beat of fear that maybe this is it, this is the fight that one of them won’t make it out of alive. 

“Don’t do this again.”

It’s Derek again who breaks the silence on the topic both of them were carefully avoiding for a time longer than necessary. 

“I know I can’t stop you fighting with me, and I wouldn’t,” he whispers in Stiles’s ear after a particularly bad fight.

They’re both still healing, Stiles obviously slower than Derek, but from fewer cuts. It’s become a habit to lie in bed together while they’re recovering, to be close enough to feel each other’s heart beating — a reassurance that both of them seem to need after they’ve come too close to not making it. 

“But please don’t take risks like you don’t care if you’ll survive. Like you don’t matter. Because you do. To me,” Derek says, almost too quietly to be heard, but just enough that Stiles can hear. 

“Okay,” he whispers back. “Okay. But… you too.”

There aren’t confessions of feelings yet, not that day, not for another while after. But it  _ is _ simple, in the end, the way they stop pretending there are no strings attached. The one thing that doesn’t change from what Stiles initially thought they would have is the part where no one gets hurt. Sure, they still do, in the battles they fight in side by side, but their hearts keep beating strong, in perfect harmony.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr](http://froggydarren.tumblr.com/) || [my sterek fic tumblr](http://triggeringthehealing.tumblr.com/)


End file.
